ChatGPT Can't Replace Google: Here's Why

This Twitter Thread is by Margaret Mitchell @mmitchell_ai (source: 12-19-2022). Mitchell is an interdisciplinary researcher.

In order to understand why ChatGPT can't replace Google Search, it's useful to understand the early days of web search and the role that PageRank played. 1/n

Before PageRank, a search would return a slew of websites of mixed utility, quality, and veracity. The results were directly tied to matches between what you queried and the text on the pages. 2/n

A web search query (roughly) meant putting in a sequence of text as a query, and getting back websites with the most likely sequences of text following your query. 3/n

That's similar to where we are with ChatGPT today.

Except, the websites are erased, and instead you get snippets of likely response text extracted from different websites. 4/n

But there was a fundamental breakthrough in Search tech with the implementation of PageRank.

With PageRank, the fact that websites link to one another could be used to identify which websites were *the most* linked to.

The *most linked* sites are the ones people tend to want. 5/n

This breakthrough was built on the *traceability* of information from the web: the linking between sources and their content. 6/n

But with ChatGPT, this traceability is erased.

The connections-between-sites that has been the bedrock of uncovering (somewhat) reliable information on the web is removed. 7/n

Crudely, what this means is that ChatGPT is in a stage that's similar to the early days of web search: Yes it can give a lot of information, no there is not a great match between what you want and useful or reliable results. 8/n

We will likely get to a place where there is a ChatSearch app that provides reasonable information. But it will require a fundamental change in how we train models like ChatGPT: 9/n

It will require training on the network of linked web sources & leveraging how they point to one another. 10/10

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